The Richer, the Poorer

by Dorothy West

  This cold was beyond that. This cold now, creeping up my legs, now reaching my knees, was like death. And suddenly I knew that my mother was dying, and her dying was invading my body as a cry for help. I did not move from my bed. I did not move at all. But I never fought so hard in my life, commanding the cold to leave my body, and thus to leave hers.

  I do not know how long it took before I began to feel it move, my knees no longer cold, my legs beginning to warm, and finally my feet free of their encasement of ice.

  I jumped up and ran downstairs to the telephone. I called the hospital. A young woman answered. When I told her who I was and asked how my mother was, she gasped and dropped the telephone. The waiting for her to pick it up again was one of the longest waiting periods in my life. Finally she did, then said in a painful voice, “I’ll let you speak to your mother’s doctor,” and put down the telephone again before I could respond.

  How long I waited for the doctor to come to the telephone I do not know. In such situations one has no conception of time. Finally he came. I heard his voice, and I will remember it as long as I live. He sounded as if he had run a long race, a long, almost unendurable race. His voice was steeped in exhaustion. But he had won. He said, “Your mother was dying. But she’s all right now. Come and see for yourself tomorrow.”

  When I reached my mother’s door, I could not bear to look. I did not know that until my mother told me later that I came to the door, backed away, came to the door again and again backed away, and did not make it to her bedside until the third try.

  I suppose it was because I did not know what she was going to look like. I did not know what the toll had been in bringing her back to life. But she was sitting up in bed, her eyes bright, her cheeks like pink roses, and her voice full of animation. She was in fact herself.

  “How do you feel?” I asked.

  “Fine,” she said. “And just look at that beautiful sun. It was snowing this morning when I had my operation. And it’s already stopped.”

  I said gently, “You had your operation yesterday morning. And after it you slept a lot.”

  She said softly, “Then I lost a day. At my age I can’t afford to lose a day.”

  “The whirlwind that you are, you’ll make it up.”

  Now in these years I am very aware of time. Now I know, too, that a day lost is a day gone forever. When I am wasteful of time, I do not forgive myself.

  THE LEGEND OF OAK BLUFFS

  It was once called Squash Meadow, this down-Island town, a fine dimension of accommodating land, rich for farming, with fields of native squash for Indian hands to harvest when fall nudged the nodding earth toward its winter sleep.

  It was the English who named the fertile tract Squash Meadow, and the pond that nourished it Squash Meadow Pond, “squash” distilled from the longer Algonquin word for it. Those names are now buried in archives, the freshwater pond long opened to the sea and called Lake Anthony, Squash Meadow turned into a town of steamboat landings, gingerbread cottages, and summer children on flying horses, whirling round and round in the realm of forever remembering.

  The Englishman who fathered the birth of Squash Meadow was Thomas Mayhew of Watertown, a merchant by trade, knowing a bargain when he saw one. He bought Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and the Elizabeth Islands from two Englishmen with royal grants for fifty pounds. To Mayhew the land that would sustain a man best seemed to be Martha’s Vineyard, the name itself—for it was always so named—a guarantee of enduring benignity. His son, Thomas, Jr., and a group of his friends bought their farm and forest tools and hunting guns, and shaped a settlement out of the eastern end of the island, calling it Great Harbour, and, in time, Edgartown.

  In 1642 John Daggett, also English-born and a Watertown neighbor of Mayhew who was now taking part in the island adventure, purchased from Mayhew the five hundred acres of farmland known as Squash Meadow. Sometime thereafter his son, Joseph, having turned twenty and taken an Indian bride, felt ready to add another notch to his manhood with the stewardship of the Squash Meadow property.

  Joseph became the first white man to build in Oak Bluffs, his squat, square house hard wrestled from oak and pine. He stayed on Squash Farm until the land was proud, his house was tight, his children flourishing. There was a new settlement called Takemmy, later to be the township of Tisbury. Joseph itched to move on to new ground, to feel its soil, to test its streams. His father had died and Squash Meadow was his inheritance. The choice was his to keep or sell. He sold it in several parcels. Among the new owners was one Simeon Butler, whose parcel included the beautiful grove that one day would be called the Camp Ground, a place whose future would be determined by religion.

  The colony’s established church was the Congregational Church in Great Harbour until 1795, when an evangelist named Jesse Lee, the father of New England Methodism, came to spread the new faith to a small gathering that numbered more curious than converts. But the scraggly meetings continued, sometimes in a borrowed house. Eventually week-long meetings were held on the grove during summer months and the numbers continued to grow. There were families who came two weeks before the meetings got under way and stayed two weeks after the closing, writing the association in advance of their coming to secure a favorite location beside familiar neighbors who were making the same request. Their children looked forward to playing together, to wading in the lake, to climbing trees, to eating together camp style outdoors. Grown-ups and children alike began to look forward to escaping the city heat for a month or so on a breeze-swept island, mixing prayer and innocent pleasure. These were the first summer people, though they would have been startled by that appellation. They had never taken vacations, as had few Americans, and they did not yet know they were doing it now.

  With the association’s permission the regulars began to build small board structures, not yet resembling the gingerbread cottages, but at least they could tell one board structure from another by some individual touch.

  The gingerbread cottages began to be built around 1860, the cottages being owned by the families who built them, but the land, then and now, leased from the association for one hundred years. The association had received its charter from the Massachusetts legislature that year.

  In that same period of time a huge amphitheater of sail cloth containing three thousand yards of canvas was erected in the center of the grove. In 1870 it was replaced by the huge iron tabernacle that was a wonder in its day.

  The Baptists were the second-largest denomination on the Vineyard. They had come as missionaries to convert the Indians, then added the white population as souls in need of proselytizing. The Baptists did not meet the same resistance from the missionary Mayhews as had the Methodists, which may have been an indication that their raids on the Congregationalists did not yield the same harvest.

  The success of the Methodist camp meeting emboldened the Baptists to approach the Methodists to suggest a summer coalition, the grove to be shared, the ministers alternated. The Methodists preferred to keep a good thing to themselves.

  The Vineyard Grove Company was one of many real estate ventures. Boardinghouses and eating places began to border the Camp Ground to serve the onslaught of visitors coming not so much to seek a spiritual place in God’s grace but to seek a summer place in his garden.

  A group of wealthy mainland men purchased the land between the Camp Ground and the sea, and incorporated themselves into the Oak Bluffs Land and Wharf Company. They called that area Oak Bluffs, and laid out streets and avenues and lovely parks. Somewhere along this point the Camp Ground Association enclosed its thirty-six acres behind a seven-foot-high picket fence to separate the sacred from the noisy hordes of the secular.

  There were now three prosperous summer settlements: the Camp Ground; the Highlands, its Baptist Temple the centerpiece of a circle of cottages, continuously extending; and Oak Bluffs, with its waterfront of magnificent cottages, its elaborate hotels, its main street shops.

  The tax money flowing into Edgartown was consi
derable, with the county seat complacently accepting it and doing nothing to deserve it. Oak Bluffs’ nearest neighbor, Tisbury, was not more than a mile away, but the only access was by boat, a slow and inconvenient arrangement. Edgartown refused to build a bridge between the towns. But after much debate, petitioners presented a bill to the Massachusetts General Court compelling the county commissioners to build the bridge. Edgartown fought the petition, lost, and the bridge was built.

  In the 1880s the first Portuguese settlement burgeoned in Oak Bluffs on rich land planted for market gardening. The area in which they lived was bound by Dukes County Avenue and County Road, and Vineyard Avenue and School Street.

  The summer cottagers bought everything the Portuguese planting brought forth, as did the hotel, the boardinghouses, the restaurants. A prized crop was flowers. There was a feast of flowers. The summer people packed their porches and parlors. It seemed to be a summer pastime to see how many flower baskets and vases could squeeze into a given space.

  There were spring and summer jobs for every able Portuguese, road work, opening cottages, readying lawns and yards, meeting the many boats, and carrying baggage to nearby houses or hotels. Women did housework, and there were those who did fine hand laundry. The summer ladies would ride through the Portuguese enclave looking for a sign that said “Fine Hand Laundry.” Those were the years when starched clothes were a mark of distinction.

  The summer people were Republican and reluctant to hire anyone who was not. They had no hesitation in asking a job-seeker about his politics. The Portuguese understood the question’s intent. They did not want the summer jobs slammed shut in their faces, and winter’s hunger to howl at their door. They said they were Republican, and in the next voter registration made sure that they were so inscribed. The town and the Island are still Republican.

  Manuel De Bettencourt—that surname still prevails in its many branches—had been one of the first to own land in the Portuguese settlement. In many ways he was the liaison between the English and the Portuguese cultures, neither at odds with the other, both loosely joined in a pragmatic union of mutual need.

  Manuel and Anna, his wife, had managed everything except a gift in the name of God. It troubled them. They and the others from the Azores who had settled on this bountiful land had much to be thankful for, and no sacred place in which to give thanks together. In their very own house, in their rarely used parlor, they made room for that sacred place. Manuel wrote to his former parish in New Bedford, asking with proper humility if there was some mainland priest who would come to say Mass whatever Sunday he could spare the time.

  And so it was that every two weeks a priest arrived from the mainland. Then there began to be a feeling of loss, of double loss on the alternate Sundays. Like a rising chorus, talk of building a church began in a muted way, then soared to a crescendo. Quickly the talk turned into tithes. A building fund was started, swelled. A Catholic manservant purchased a building lot just around the corner from Manuel’s house and donated the lot to the cause.

  In a miracle of time the church was built and called the Sacred Heart. Across the street there was soon to be the Sacred Heart Rectory and the joyous affirmation of a priest in residence. The old church is now the Sacred Heart Parish Hall. A larger, more centrally located church is Our Lady Star of the Sea, its congregation, year-round and summer, of every social stratum, with an easy mingling of races.

  The twenties were in giant-size bloom on the Island. Summer money fell like rain on all the towns, especially the down-Island towns, and notably Oak Bluffs, with its accessibility to steamboat landings, with its carriages and automobiles for hire, its Tivoli dance hall, its moving-picture houses, its bandstand in the park, and the Methodist Tabernacle, no longer a hotbed of fiery evangelists, but still an impressive place of assembly, with important guest speakers on a latitude of topics, and musical performances with gifted artists, and the magical, lantern-lit Illumination Night, as unique an experience as can be had.

  Then it was 1929, and the stock market crash, and on its heels, the Depression. And for the decade following the crash Oak Bluffs suffered a lingering sickness of meager summers. It was the town hardest hit because it was the town whose summer business had been its only business. The great houses stood empty, too large to run without servants, and too few, if any, families who could still afford a staff. The hotels and shops that struggled to stay open were barely staying alive. “For Sale” signs were everywhere, and there were no buyers. Those half-empty steamers discharged from their decks only those summer arrivals whose cottages had been family-owned into the fourth generation. They could not deny these fourth-generation children their birthright to an island summer and break the chain of privilege.

  The non-WASPs were of such slight numerical strength that they had never come close to rocking the boat. Nor had they tried. They had kept a low profile, especially the little pockets of vacationing black Bostonians. It was a fine accomplishment for these early comers to the Island to own summer cottages, whatever their size, whatever their lack of inside conveniences. Kerosene lamps cast a lovely soft light. The backyard pump poured water sweeter than any from an indoor faucet.

  That they could afford a cottage at all, that a black man could send his wife and children on a summer vacation was a clear indication that he had made a profitable place for himself in the white world, vaulting whatever color bar stood in his way. His motivations were a fierce sense of family and a proud acknowledgment of his role as its head.

  In the Depression years there were enough of them established as summer residents to constitute a definable colony, devoutly committed to a yearly return at whatever sacrifice of winter’s priorities, with whatever pared amount of vacation money, and with the most careful piecing together of summer clothes.

  They were among that legion that adds adherents every summer, those who find the Island irresistible, and have to set foot on its waiting shore, and sift the white sand in a cupped hand, and smell that salt tang of the sea. This is the rite that purges them of all evil.

  The genesis of the black colony was no more than a dozen families. From that group of cottagers the colony made slow but pervasive growth, drawing its component parts of acceptable people from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and a scattering of other certifiable cities, excluding the Deep South cities because of an obsessive fear that the Deep South people might bring their attitudes of uncertainty to a place where blacks did not hang back to let the whites go first.

  With Pearl Harbor, prosperity zoomed from high-rise to hovel, money became a common commodity, and those who had never had a cent to spare could look beyond the landlord’s outstretched hand. New economic classes emerged and rapidly became aware that there were people in established classes who lived lives of more variety than city streets and subway benches. The new partakers of prosperity did not know what a day in the country looked like but now had the means to find out.

  Oak Bluffs received its share of seekers of the good life. And the good life had many definitions. It was a time of experimentation, of trial and error, an occasional triumph, adjustment or disengagement, observed behavior abided by or rejected.

  There were blacks who tried the Island once, and came no more. They were done in by the fog, and the creepy feeling, and the foghorn making mournful sounds all night. And the beaches, the whole place surrounded by beaches. When you’ve seen one, the others don’t look any different. And the woods. When you’ve seen one tree, you’ve seen the rest of the forest. A dirt road goes nowhere. What do you do for excitement? Dullsville.

  But the others found more than they ever hoped that they would find. A place where they could stand to full size. The town was right for them, and the time of their coming was right for the town. The wave of whites washed across the whole Island, but the blacks settled where the way had been charted.

  They made a massive imprint. They bought the big neglected houses, and other long-empty cottages, lifted their sagging facades, put in new
plumbing and wiring, scrubbed and polished and painted. The more improvements they made, the more they paid in taxes and increased the town’s returns.

  In the early eighties the old guard, the originals, are only remainders, a vanishing though unvanquished group, once labeled the Forty; forty women serenely secure who, with their husbands, were on everybody’s party lists, those big August parties when the husbands who could afford a longer stay than a weekend took a two-week vacation which, as time passed and incomes doubled, would extend to the standard month.

  In the main they were always a professional group, a pattern of people whose occupations in the fields of white predominance demanded a confident self-image, which enlarged their worldliness and gave strong support to their observation that summer vacations were the color of green money. Black money, Jewish money, Irish money here were just as green as high-and-mighty money, though maybe not as old and honorable or as carefully used.

  In the upper strata of black families, loyalty, and, almost concomitantly, group loyalty are chiseled into their earliest consciousness. If these loyalties were once regional, it was because the automobile had not yet become a national necessity, nor was plane travel a common practice. Now from anywhere to everywhere is only a matter of hours. On the Island, in particular Oak Bluffs, the bonding of blacks comes into sharpest focus.

  There are some who think that these blacks sprang full-grown from the earth into preordained postures of success. No, their advantage was that their forebears came out of slavery with a fierce will to make up for lost time, and few descendants have let that momentum slacken.

  Oak Bluffs is an archetype of the art of people living together where their similarities are points of contact and their differences are intriguing regions to explore. Almost everyone, summer or year-round resident, has friends of every race and every level of experience. The few and fragile summer strongholds of resistance still remaining are now anachronisms. If the best is yet to come, the present will blend with it beautifully.